RS

FRONT PAGE CONTRIBUTOR

Anti-Muslim Speech and Consequences

Ordinarily I think having senior civil servants go out into the hinterlands to meet with the Great Unwashed is a good thing. It gets them out of a bubble where process is the product and lets them see how their action and inaction affects the citizens of the country. If anything it may reacquaint them with the notion that they are servants of the people and have a duty to respect the rule of law and disabuse them of any ambitions they may have to acting as some sort of neo-feudal nobility. Any idea that this still applies in the Obama regime disappeared when a man named Bill Killian, decided to speak to the American Muslim Advisory Council of Tennessee on the subject of “Public Disclosure in a Diverse Society.” When Mr. Killian is up and dressed he is the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Tennessee.

According to Politico, Killian believes that anti-Muslim speech, whatever the hell that may be, can be punished under Federal civil rights laws.

“We need to educate people about Muslims and their civil rights, and as long as we’re here, they’re going to be protected,” Killian told the newspaper.

Killian, along with the FBI special agent that runs the Knoxville office, are set to speak next week to a special meeting with the local Muslim community, informing them about their rights under federal law.

“This is an educational effort with civil rights laws as they play into freedom of religion and exercising freedom of religion,” Killian said about the meeting. “This is also to inform the public what federal laws are in effect and what the consequences are.”

Killian pointed to a recent controversy where a local Tennessee politician posted a photo of a man aiming a shotgun at the camera with the caption “How to wink at a Muslim.”

“If a Muslim had posted ‘How to Wink at a Christian,’ could you imagine what would have happened?” Killian asked, according to the newspaper.

Killian really should get out more. No matter how one feels about the “wink at a muslim” picture, one has to be a freakin idiot to believe that any law was broken or, even more bizarrely, that a similar picture aimed at Christians would result in anyone caring; much less Mr. Killian and full weight of the federal investigative apparatus.

The salient point here is that anyone who believes any statement any American says about any religion is subject to prosecution should not be allowed out of a locked cellar. That belief and anyone who holds it are not reconcilable with the American system of government, though they fit in very well under sharia and the concept of dhimmitude.

No one, as far as I know, is actively depriving Muslims of the civil rights. To the contrary, in Muslim versus Christian clashes in the United States it is usually Christians who have their right trampled underfoot. Dearborn, Michigan, is a treasure trove of examples. Mr. Killian seems blithely unaware that civil rights laws might possibly apply to Americans exercising their freedom of religion if they are not Muslim.

Killian and his attack on free speech is far from a “rogue” US Attorney going bonkers. It is just another example of the regulatory state being given free rein to declare war on American citizens with whom it disagrees.

Last week, Peggy Noonan wrote on this phenomenon in the Wall Street Journal about the IRS freelancing as a field arm of the Democrat Party:

In previous IRS scandals it was the powerful abusing the powerful—a White House moving against prominent financial or journalistic figures who, because of their own particular status or the machineries at their disposal, could pretty much take care of themselves. A scandal erupts, there are headlines, and then people go on their way. The dreadful thing about this scandal, what makes it ominous, is that this is the elites versus regular citizens. It’s the mighty versus normal people. It’s the all-powerful directors of the administrative state training their eyes and moving on uppity and relatively undefended Americans.

That’s what makes this scandal different, and why if it’s not stopped now it will never stop. Because every four years you can get yourself a new president and a new White House, but you won’t easily get yourself a whole new administrative state. It’s there, it’s not going away, not anytime soon. If it isn’t forced back into its cage now, and definitively, it will prowl the land hungrily forever.

While the impetus has long existed with the regulatory agencies, and for the purposes of this I am including the hyper-militarized police agencies operating in federal departments, to act as an oppressive elite. Look at the history of the EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers in regards to environmental law and the FBI and BATF anytime they have to deal with people different from themselves and you will see plenty of examples of casual disregard for the Constitution, for the law, for tradition, and for human life.

What makes Killian’s juvenile exposition on civil rights and the IRS’s hit squad in Cincinnati possible is something that has not happened before, and something that eludes Noonan in her article, is that this behavior is what President Obama wants. It is what Erick pointed out a couple of weeks ago. These people are carrying out the policies of the administration. No sane person believes 90 or so IRS employees are going to put their employment in jeopardy unless they were acting with the Administration’s blessing. Ditto, no US Attorney is going to pledge to “punish”, according to the Politico headline, what he perceives as “anti-Muslim” sentiment in social media unless he was sure it was okay.

Noonan, though, quite accurately points out the foreseeable consequence of this. If this behavior goes unchecked we can look forward to more and more egregious violations of our actual citizenship by unelected and unanswerable agencies. And we need to keep in mind these agencies do not change direction simply because there is a new president.